InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Using DORA for Sustainable Engineering Performance Improvement
DORA can help to drive sustainable change, depending on how it is used by teams and the way it is supported in a company. According to Carlo Beschi, getting good data for the DORA keys can be challenging. Teams can use DORA reports for continuous improvement by analysing the data and taking actions.
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Managing High-Performing Software Teams
High-performing teams expect their leader to enable them to make things better, Gillard-Moss said at QCon London. Independence in software teams can enable decision-making for faster delivery. Teams need empathy, understanding, and guidance from their managers.
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How to Improve Software Team Performance with Experimentation
According to Terhi Aho, experimentation is a way of thinking that guides action. By experimenting we can develop ways of working without a major change process. It can help software teams to solve problems in small steps, relieve their workload, and foster self-management.
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Planning, Automation and Monorepo: How Monzo Does Code Migrations Across 2800 Microservices
Monzo products are supported by an extensive microservice-based platform of over 2800 services. The company relies on planning and heavy automation to drive code migrations at scale and leverages config service to support gradual roll forwards and quick rollbacks in case of issues. Migrations are managed by a central team rather than service owner teams to avoid delays and inconsistencies.
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Enabling Fast Flow in Software Organizations
Resolving impediments to flow and removing unnecessary sources of cognitive load can make culture issues disappear in organisations, Nigel Kersten argued. Start with a clear strategy that is easy to communicate, then follow the path to creating stream-aligned teams and platform teams, he suggested.
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How a Game of Patterns Can Help Software Organisations to Gain Insights and Improve
Patterns can help us to understand how things work and how cultures develop. The game in an organisational system is about recognizing patterns and anti-patterns. According to Tiani Jones, leaders should work on the system rather than in the system and create the conditions for the development and sustainment of good patterns in software organisations.
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How Continuous Discovery Helps Software Teams to Take Product Decisions
Continuous discovery for product development is regular research that involves the entire software product team, and that can actively inform product decisions. Equating continuous discovery to weekly conversations with one or more customers can be misleading. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods can help software teams gather data and understand what is behind the data.
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Booking.com Doubles Delivery Performance Using DORA Metrics and Micro Frontends
The team in Booking.com’s fintech business unit implemented a series of improvements across the backend and the frontend of its platform and was able to double the delivery performance, as measured by DORA metrics. Additionally, the Micro Frontends (MFE) pattern was used to break up the monolithic FE application into multiple decomposed apps that could be deployed separately.
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Embracing Complexity and Emergence in Organisations
Focusing on the actual emerging organisation and the work people are doing can make a difference in embracing complexity and dealing with it a bit better. Psychological safety is critical for people giving feedback without fearing retribution or negative consequences. Fred Hebert spoke about embracing complexity at QCon New York 2023.
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A Culture of Continuous Experimentation: Learnings from QCon New York
At QCon New York 2023, Sarah Aslanifar presented Building a Culture of Continuous Experimentation. She showed how fostering a culture of continuous experimentation and leveraging the principle of continuous learning can drive efficiency, eliminate waste, and improve product outcomes.
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Treat Your CI System as a Product for Faster and Better Feedback
Improving the feedback time of a continuous integration (CI) system and optimizing the test methods and classes resulted in more effective feedback for development teams. CI systems are an important part of the development process and should be treated as such.
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How to Assess Software Quality
The quality practices assessment model (QPAM) can be used to classify a team’s exhibited behavior into four dimensions: Beginning, Unifying, Practicing, and Innovating. It explores social and technical quality aspects like feedback loops, culture, code quality and technical debt, and deployment pipeline.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Helping Teams Deliver with a Quality Practices Assessment Model
The quality practices assessment model explores quality aspects that help teams to deliver in an agile way. The model covers both social and technical aspects of quality; it is used to assess the quality of the team’s processes and also touches on product quality. With an assessment, teams can look at where their practices lie within the quality aspects and decide on what they want to improve.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.